131–140 of 243 posts
Is anybody here using perl 6 in production at the moment? Or perl 5 for that matter?
Pretty much anybody using Unix is using Perl one way or the other. Its a bit like C. The language is so neatly integrated with the OS that its hard to beat it.
Not many languages feel so "Unixy" as Perl.
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The progress on Perl 5 has been remarkable too. Complex data structures no longer require you to wave a dead chicken and spelunk through StackExchange for hours. Unicode just works most of the time. Useful new features appear in the language, even though you would rightfully expect it to be in maintenance mode.
> Complex data structures no longer require you to wave a dead chicken Do you have a reference on changes to data structure syntax in 5.x? Probably my biggest frustration was trying to use anything beyond a scalar list - it always ended up a mess of hashrefs.
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I heard many times that perl is «write only». Unicode operators takes it to the next level.
APL has used a huge set of non ASCII characters for more than 30 years in production by large companies.
Perl Pessimism: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=perl I have happy memories of Perl, and it started me on the path that led to a nice career of Python awesomeness. Thanks, Perl! That said, I can't imagine a plausible scenario where I'd ever consider using it again. I almost certainly wouldn't use it professionally because it's not exactly going to light up a resume. Yes, there are still Perl shops.…
Is there anything "suspicious" about using Perl other than it's not as popular as Python, according to Google Trends?
- “We have lots of deployed code and don’t want to rewrite the whole thing.” That’s valid (although I still urge them to consider the hiring challenges down the road).
- “I’ve used Perl exclusively since I downloaded it over dialup and I’m not interested in those shiny new languages the kids like.” Run screaming.
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Is there anything "suspicious" about using Perl other than it's not as popular as Python, according to Google Trends?
No, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. I’ve run across two distinct sets of Perl mongers, though: - “We have lots of deployed code and don’t want to rewrite the whole thing.” That’s valid (although I still urge them to consider the hiring challenges down the road). - “I’ve used Perl exclusively since I downloaded it over dialup and I’m not interested in those shiny new languages the kids like.” Run screaming.
Perl Pessimism: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=perl I have happy memories of Perl, and it started me on the path that led to a nice career of Python awesomeness. Thanks, Perl! That said, I can't imagine a plausible scenario where I'd ever consider using it again. I almost certainly wouldn't use it professionally because it's not exactly going to light up a resume. Yes, there are still Perl shops.…
>>Yes, there are still Perl shops. But no, there aren't very many of them That's because any shop that needs to get job done quickly is a Perl shop. During my early career I even knew a architect who had sort of put a blanket ban on any Perl to be written. He was only stumped people were largely acting like pirates, were writing and running directories full of Perl code all the time. Only a week back, I needed some s…
I don’t understand why Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language. There’s no compatibility between the two. You can’t write a library that works in both versions, so you lose CPAN and the thousands of packages that make Perl so powerful. I don’t think there’s even any reliable way to translate Perl 5 source code. This is a vastly larger change than python 2->3, and people are still using p…
>I don’t understand why Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language. A lot of people seem to have forgotten, or maybe they weren't around for it, but when Larry anounced Perl 6 it wasn't for a totally different language. It was the next version of Perl . Just as Perl 5 was to Perl 4, and 4 was to 3 and so on. This idea that it's a completely different language and has no relation with 5 is s…
... he very clearly emphasized that it was NOT just the next version of Perl, in contrast with his approach with earlier Perls.
> This idea that it's a completely different language and has no relation with 5 is something people started saying when it was clear that Perl 6 wasn't just around the corner.
I think it's just a chinese whispers effect.
To folk who paid attention to what Larry said on day one, it was obvious that P5 and P6 were (are) not the same and are not totally different either and are related.
Around a decade ago some folk began repeating the mantra that P5 and P6 were different languages in the same family. The hope was that this would help.
But some folk don't like nuance so they arrived at clearly made up and extreme views like "completely different language ... no relation with 5".
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>>Yes, there are still Perl shops. But no, there aren't very many of them That's because any shop that needs to get job done quickly is a Perl shop. During my early career I even knew a architect who had sort of put a blanket ban on any Perl to be written. He was only stumped people were largely acting like pirates, were writing and running directories full of Perl code all the time. Only a week back, I needed some s…
> That's because any shop that needs to get job done quickly is a Perl shop. Be careful with that wild generalization. I’ve seen lots more “get job done quickly” in Ruby than Perl (but neither as much as with Python recently). I have nothing bad to say about Perl, but it’s not really defensible to claim it’s used as commonly as other languages.
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As a former Perl programmer, dabbling in Python, I keep getting reminded how awesome Perl is. For example: I'm collecting some stats indexed by (small) ints. In Perl, I'd just say $collection[$index] = $stat; Try that in Python when $index is not received in order. Edit: Fixed typo; meant "$stat" and not "%stat"
In Python: dict[index] = stat ...works much the same.